Adwaita (design language)
theme for the GNOME desktop environment
Adwaita is the design language of the GNOME desktop environment GUI interface. As an implementation, it exists as the default theme and icon set of the GNOME Shell and Phosh, and as widgets for applications targeting usage in GNOME. Adwaita first appeared in 2011 with the release of GNOME 3.0 as a replacement for the design principles used in Clearlooks, and with incremental modernization and refinements, continues with current version releases.
Until 2021, Adwaita's theme was included as a part of the GTK widget toolkit, but in an effort to further increase independence and divergent release schedules of GTK from that of GNOME, it has since been migrated to libadwaita, which as an overall project, serves to extend GTK's base widgets with those specifically conforming to the GNOME human interface guidelines.
Development
Prior to version 3.0, the GNOME desktop environment utilized the Clearlooks theme. In October 2008, designers and developers met at the GNOME User Experience Hackfest in Boston. During this event, the concept of a GNOME Shell was conceived. Some very early mockups were produced that entertained the possibility of differing design from the previous incarnation of GNOME. Red Hat designers Jon McCann and Jeremy Perry authored a document, drawn from a broad consensus of collaborative effort, that aimed to set standards and direction for GNOME's design. In February 2010, GNOME designers met again, and produced several more publicly-available mockups.
Also produced from the 2010 meeting was the decision to use Cantarell as the default typeface. Cantarell had been designed by Dave Crossland during his studies in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading the previous year.
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